


Midsummer / Midwinter

by MissWoodhouse



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 21:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13466904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissWoodhouse/pseuds/MissWoodhouse
Summary: If a bench exists in two worlds, why not more?...On Midsummer’s Day, on a bench, in a garden, a girl and a boy sit together, worlds apart...





	Midsummer / Midwinter

On Midsummer’s Day, on a bench, in a garden, a girl and a boy sit together, worlds apart.

 

…

 

Lyra never sleeps on Midsummer’s Eve, because she heard as a child it’s when fairies come out to play.

 

…

 

It’s the sort of day Lucy would say reminds her of Narnia. Warm, and blue-skied, with a bright, cheerful sun peaking out from unusually white and puffy clouds. Everything an English summer is meant to be, when it isn’t wet and dreary and grey like London. Even the buildings here are a golden, sun-kissed sort of color, like a lion’s fur or the sandy cliffs of Cair Paravel.

 

If Edmund closes his eyes, he can almost imagine, just for a moment, he’s back there, outside the castle, instead of sitting on a bench, in the Oxford Botanic Gardens, waiting to collect Peter so they can go home.

 

…

 

Will’s never quite sure he’s picked the right hour, to visit with Lyra on their bench, in their garden, on Midsummer’s Day. He’s only allowed an hour (he’d never leave again he gave it any longer), before he’s got to get back to work, but he wants it to be the _right_ hour. The _same_ hour. How foolish they were, not to think through the details like that.

 

The first many times, he overthinks it. How well can he remember Lyra’s habits? (Perfectly). What time did she like to wake up, to adventure, to sleep? What would be her perfect time of day?

 

The problem – of course – is that she’s perfectly unpredictable, and he’ll drive himself mad trying to work out when she’d think he’d think that she’d come. Instead, he heaves a big sigh and shrugs.

 

If the universe can bend itself to make two identical benches in two identical gardens in two entirely un-identical worlds, then surely it can bend itself to bring together two people in two benches in two gardens at the exact same time.

 

…

 

 

Lyra never sleeps on Midsummer’s Eve, nerves thrumming with anticipation, stomach aflutter. She fusses by the mirror – as she never does on other days – although today her calendar is always clear. And then, just after midnight, she sneaks over the fence (always over the fence, never through the gate) and into the garden, and makes her way – past the great trees, through the archway, and over the bridge – to their bench. Even when she’s too old for sneaking and midnight rambles, she does it this way, anything else just wouldn’t seem right. And besides, they don’t let you in the gates until mid-morning, and Lyra wouldn’t want to miss a moment of this day.

 

…

 

The letter comes, not long after the crash, when Susan can’t quite decide whether she wants to hoard or toss out every scrap of anything to reminds her of the others. It’s official looking, and says Oxford on it, so she thinks it might be important, but it’s only a recruiting drive, asking Edmund to renew his membership at the University Botanic Garden. He won’t be needing that anymore, she thinks, as she pushes it somewhere in the general direction of the bin.

 

She finds it again later, when she’s cleaning up, and decides for the moment, she’ll just toss it in Ed and Pete’s room, with everything else she tells herself she’ll sort out later.

 

Eventually, she drags herself onto the train at Paddington and up to Oxford, to collect her brothers’ things from college. The porters make tutting noises, as they hand her keys and look sorry for her, and it isn’t very long before she knows that she’s got to get out or she’ll cry. She’s remembers the gardens, and that Ed must have loved them, and thinks perhaps a bit of fresh air will do her good.

 

…

 

On nights like this, Edmund needs the fresh air, craves it, even though the cold wind stings his memory like so many icicles, like pointed accusations, like guilt. When he’s inside, on nights like these, in deepest Midwinter, however close he is to the fire, the cold seeps in. The chill stones of Cair Paravel might almost belong to an ice castle, where a boy, so much younger and yet hardly at all, sat bundled in fur blankets, shivering all the same.

 

But out here, where the wind whips through the tree branches, winter feels alive, it feels active – not like a hundred years of hibernation at all.

 

Out here, in the palace garden, past the large trees and through the arch by the corner of the proud brick wall, Edmund can sit on a bench all his own, and feel alive. And sometimes, feeling alive means memories, and guilt, and owning up to your mistakes, because that’s the stuff of life. Because Edmund’s penance exists on the battlefield, in a just rule, in being kinder to his siblings, but sometimes, it also means remembering what it took to get to where he is.

 

Lucy doesn’t get it, thinks she’s forgiven him so he should feel forgiven, doesn’t understand that sometimes he just needs to feel. Peter doesn’t get it either, believes in actions, not words, and doesn’t understand why Edmund sits and mulls things over. Neither of them likes to see the garden frost-coated by bleak midwinter.

 

But sometimes, when he’s been out there long enough that his knuckles are going purple with the cold, Susan comes out with a pair of knit mittens, and a warm mug of tea (never cocoa). She comes and sits beside him, a gentle presence that knows when not to prod too much. Sometimes, they sit in silence. And sometimes, Susan tells stories, fairytales from a land long ago and far away (beyond a wardrobe), where cold hearts thaw and monsters turn back into men, because all they really needed was a true friend to seek out their love.

 

…

 

Will finds Winter the hardest sometimes, with the cold, and the grey, and not much chance for fresh air. He takes to visiting the gardens, with their hothouses, where he can almost pretend to be stepping into another world, far from here. It isn’t the same (of course it isn’t), but it’s something. And like benches and Midsummer, sometimes something is the only thing you’ve got.

 

He sometimes (always) stops by their bench before he leaves. He never sits down (except on Midsummer – that’s the rule), but he stops, and stares. And sometimes, when he stays there long enough, he can almost imagine that he sees her waiting there too.

 

…

 

Lyra has ridden through the arctic on the back of a brave, kind polar bear, has seen the morning lights, and days that have no sunrise. Winters back in Oxford should be mild, easy.

 

And yet, ever since Will, they’re not. Winter becomes a battleground, a journey to be pushed through, like she’s walking head-on into the frostiest, moaning winds. Winter feels as far from Will as she can get, a whole six months since their date on the bench in the garden, a whole six months until she’ll spend that hour with him again.

 

Midwinter becomes her benchmark – the day she tells herself she’s made it halfway there.

 

Midwinter becomes her bench-mark – she takes to visiting the bench, staring at it, puzzling it out. Looking for some sense of how Will’s world is doing – does her bench look like his bench, even as their benches, change, weather, are marked up?

 

The bench becomes her homing beacon, due north on her compass. Midsummer, Midwinter, so many days between. Her journeys circle back around the bench, always the first part of Oxford to say hello to, always her final goodbye.

 

...

 

Susan is at Oxford herself now, a Professor in her own right – a bluestocking who never grew up or grew up too fast. There are ghosts here, of course there are, but different from the house in Finchley, the Professor’s in the country, her first flat after the war. Susan didn’t know her siblings here – they were here and she was there, and she only caught glimpses of their lives. Here, the ghosts are only possibilities, and possibilities don’t linger on her mind for quite as long.

 

Usually, it’s Edmund, sometimes Peter, when she finds a view or a book, or a pub that one of them might have adored. Rarely ever is it Lucy – Lucy’s never been here after all. But one night, it snows in Oxford – it rarely snows here, not in this part of the country. Vaguely, she remembers a winter in her youth when it snowed and snowed. It must have been when they lived with the Professor, out in the countryside. Except – except wasn’t it just a summer they spent in that house?

 

Anyway it snowed, with big, puffy flakes that coated the roads, and the streetlamps, and the trees. And from Susan’s study window – the one looking out from her desk to the street below – there formed a lovely little picture, like something out of a story book. A warm, gold light shone from the box of a frost-coated lamp-post, with the snow falling prettily all around. And for a moment, she saw a girl who looked just like Lucy, taking hands with a man in brown fur and a bright red scarf. Then she blinked, and they were gone, only a vision that might once have been a dream.

But something about it pulls her towards them, out into the cold winter's night.  To the lamp-post and beyond it, until finally, she comes to rest on an almost-familiar garden bench.

 

…

 

Lyra never makes plans on Midwinter’s day now; Will always finds his way there to their bench. If Midsummer is for fairies, then Midwinter is for families, gathering by the hearth. But they don’t have a hearth, these two, not their distant little family. But sometimes, a simple, wooden bench can be the next best thing.

 

…

 

On cold winter nights, when it snowed like Narnia – for even in Aslan’s country, they’d grow bored without the seasons – Edmund leaves the others and goes hunting for the place where Aslan’s put his bench. Well, his and Susan’s bench, really, but here in Aslan’s country, his sister’s name has become a forbidden fruit.

 

It feels daring, almost to taste it on his lips, on this bench, tucked away over a bridge from nowhere, with midwinter winds drowning out his whispers as they blow.

 

“Where are you, Susan?” he asks to the open sky that stretches across his universe and maybe hers. “Where are you?”

 

And sometimes, a gentle, radiant sun glistens off the white snow and warms him

 

Sometimes, the winds might almost whisper back to him as they blow.

 

…

 

On Midwinter’s Night, on a bench, in a garden, a girl and a boy sit together, worlds apart.

**Author's Note:**

> Mixing up my Oxford fantasy writers because why not?
> 
> Knowing Pullman's thoughts on Lewis' 'Problem of Susan' (and agreeing with most of them), I wanted to try a 'His Dark Materials' sort of coda for her - an ending that's still bittersweet, but a bit more satisfying. And of course, that meant I simply had to re-visit The Bench.


End file.
